In receiving the information from our placement agency, Children's Hope International (CHI), we realized all the paperwork we need to gather in addition to all the paperwork we needed to gather for our home study. Our documents need to be notarized and then some even need to be apostilled by the Secretary of State. We need fingerprints notarized, FBI background checks, letters from our Doctor, a letter from our CPA, notarized reference letters, photo albums for the kids (which I put together and were quite fun to do!), a photo book for the Institute of Child Welfare in Colombia (ICBF), a letter of Introduction for the ICBF, copies of our passports, a psych eval...the list goes on and on...this is why the "dossier" which is what this total package is called takes the longest amount of time. Today we got in some of our apostilling = our birth records, our marriage certificate and an affidavit of our names. We sent this in last week and got it right back so I am excited for the turn around of our documents thus far. Now we are waiting for Leah to continue to put together our home study then we need to send it to our placement agency for approval and then to our psych person the placement agency uses. A lot of stamps will be used over the next few months... :) Biggest things I have learned with all of this is being organized and being patient. Thank goodness CHI gave us a checklist for all this paperwork, you all know how much I love checklists! :)
On a side note Leah sent me an email this week letting me know that she began the home study process with a new family this week who is interested in adopting from Latin America. The coolest thing about this process we have found is the openness EVERYONE has been to speaking with us and sharing information. Now we get to share information with ours and help them on this journey too. SO cool!
Cheers!
Monday, August 15, 2011
Tuesday, August 2, 2011
The steps...
Matthew and I have completed the home study. We did the process a bit backwards but it is because we are using two agencies instead of a one stop shop. Typically you would find an agency that does it all and you begin with the home study after you have selected a country and such.
We are waiting for the social worker to put together our story from her perspective; we had 6 visits with her where we chatted about why we want to adopt, our family, our lives, our views on parenting, why Colombia, why two children (siblings) from age newborn to 7, why no gender preference, why healthy children, what are our views on schools, religion, teenage pregnancy, contacting birth parents, abuse both emotional and physical, what are our support systems like, who are our friends that have children and what is our interaction with them, thoughts on children with disabilities, empowering our children to feel comfortable discussing the adoption, our siblings, our parents, our Children's caretakers in case something happens to us, the diversity in our town and living area, do we have remodels of color for our kids... list can go on and on. We answered a lot of questions we never thought to ask ourselves when we become biological parents. Leah gave us homework of watching a few videos in adoption and doing a test provided by PACT; the "test" demonstrated some pretty crazy facts about us and also showed how different our upbringings were but in a good way. FYI the #1 cause of death for African Americans is not gun wounds...it is heart disease. We also realized that we do not know a lot of diverse history, meaning diverse inventors and such...we need to do more research about Colombia and it's history!!
Then we had to find a placement agency, Leah had recommended we look at online blogs for reviews from parents, that we look into the state website to see how may children have come in from various countries this past year and email agencies on the ACONE list we received to ask them questions about their agency. In doing all this we probably emailed 25 agencies and narrowed our country list down to 13. Then I got on some yahoo groups and we narrowed down our placement agency to Children's Hope International and Colombia. Our choices were primarily based on how the children were treated while waiting to be adopted; in most orphanages children are two to a crib or bed, they are rarely held and there attachment with their new parents takes an extraordinary amount of time; in Colombia most children adopted from CHI are in foster care, their mami's give them constant love and affection, they educate the child on adoption and their new parents. CHI had amazing reviews from families adopting for various countries and in speaking with the agents they were timely and thorough, which as you all know me these things are VERY important.
Now we are gathering our international documents for CHI, we received a booklet of about 35 pages of things we need to gather, get notarized, finger prints, pictures, apostilling...etc... The faster we get this information together the better, typically the year time frame starts from when you submit your dossier which is this content. So if we can get this in by October and the typical turn around time from Colombia is 2-4 weeks then our time frame of next Christmas will hopefully come true.
For those that have thought about adoption and such, here are some sites to check out. Xoxo!
http://adoption.state.gov/
http://www.childrenshopeint.org/
http://www.pactadopt.org/
http://www.redthreadadopt.org/
We are waiting for the social worker to put together our story from her perspective; we had 6 visits with her where we chatted about why we want to adopt, our family, our lives, our views on parenting, why Colombia, why two children (siblings) from age newborn to 7, why no gender preference, why healthy children, what are our views on schools, religion, teenage pregnancy, contacting birth parents, abuse both emotional and physical, what are our support systems like, who are our friends that have children and what is our interaction with them, thoughts on children with disabilities, empowering our children to feel comfortable discussing the adoption, our siblings, our parents, our Children's caretakers in case something happens to us, the diversity in our town and living area, do we have remodels of color for our kids... list can go on and on. We answered a lot of questions we never thought to ask ourselves when we become biological parents. Leah gave us homework of watching a few videos in adoption and doing a test provided by PACT; the "test" demonstrated some pretty crazy facts about us and also showed how different our upbringings were but in a good way. FYI the #1 cause of death for African Americans is not gun wounds...it is heart disease. We also realized that we do not know a lot of diverse history, meaning diverse inventors and such...we need to do more research about Colombia and it's history!!
Then we had to find a placement agency, Leah had recommended we look at online blogs for reviews from parents, that we look into the state website to see how may children have come in from various countries this past year and email agencies on the ACONE list we received to ask them questions about their agency. In doing all this we probably emailed 25 agencies and narrowed our country list down to 13. Then I got on some yahoo groups and we narrowed down our placement agency to Children's Hope International and Colombia. Our choices were primarily based on how the children were treated while waiting to be adopted; in most orphanages children are two to a crib or bed, they are rarely held and there attachment with their new parents takes an extraordinary amount of time; in Colombia most children adopted from CHI are in foster care, their mami's give them constant love and affection, they educate the child on adoption and their new parents. CHI had amazing reviews from families adopting for various countries and in speaking with the agents they were timely and thorough, which as you all know me these things are VERY important.
Now we are gathering our international documents for CHI, we received a booklet of about 35 pages of things we need to gather, get notarized, finger prints, pictures, apostilling...etc... The faster we get this information together the better, typically the year time frame starts from when you submit your dossier which is this content. So if we can get this in by October and the typical turn around time from Colombia is 2-4 weeks then our time frame of next Christmas will hopefully come true.
For those that have thought about adoption and such, here are some sites to check out. Xoxo!
http://adoption.state.gov/
http://www.childrenshopeint.org/
http://www.pactadopt.org/
http://www.redthreadadopt.org/
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